Why go
From the bench to the partnership
Greg Wade keeps the bread work close as Managing Partner at Publican Quality Bread in Chicago, where the daily question begins with grain, fermentation, and the oven. His route to this bench has been unusually legible: formal training at Illinois Institute of Art’s Culinary Program, a baker’s post at Taxim in Wicker Park, then the opening team at Girl & the Goat in 2010. By 2013 he was overseeing bread baking across Girl & the Goat, Little Goat, and Little Goat French Market, a station that treated bread as service infrastructure rather than garnish.
Publican Quality Bread became the next stage in 2014, first with Wade as Head Baker and now with him carrying the wider responsibility of partner. The title has changed, but the discipline still reads as a baker’s discipline: repetition, timing, control, and the ability to make a loaf behave the same way for the counter, for wholesale, and for the cooks who build around it. Wade has also been direct about the system around the bakery, connecting his work to food security, equity, and sustainability. That matters here because the bread program is not framed as ornament. It is a daily production craft with a point of view.
Long fermentation and heritage grain
The method at Publican Quality Bread rests on natural fermentation, whole grains, and breads baked in-house each day before they move to the shelves. The bakery’s own language keeps returning to grain, not decoration, and the clearest loaves follow that line: sourdough, heritage grain breads, Multigrain “1979,” Honey Lavendar Boules, and Sourdough Baguettes made with local grains. The point is not variety for its own sake. It is a program built around what flour can carry when the dough is given time.
Pastry works from the same center of gravity. The case includes whole-grain pastries, and Wade’s broader signature range includes Chocolate Jam Bars, lamb phyllo pies, Dreamsicle Sourdough Croissant, and Bread Head: Baking for the Road Less Traveled. Those forms ask different things of the hand, from lamination to filling to structure, but they sit inside the same practice. Bread remains the measure. The bakery also supplies bread beyond the counter, through local stores, restaurants, and wholesale channels, so consistency is not a private virtue here. It has to survive distance.
The counter while the ovens work
The room in West Town is relaxed without becoming casual about the work. Bread comes forward as the main event: loaves, pastries, coffee, sandwiches, shelves that turn the oven schedule into a public rhythm. The atmosphere is conversational, more bakery-cafe than dining room, with the counter carrying the exchange between the people who arrive for a morning brew and the hands behind the bench.
There is a rustic quality to the place, but not as set dressing. It comes from flour, crust, paper bags, the smell of bread cooling, and the fact that the bakery’s retail face still belongs to a larger production operation. The best close to the room is a loaf with a name on it, because the place makes its argument through things you can carry home: Multigrain “1979,” a Sourdough Baguette, a Honey Lavendar Boule.
